At the end of last year, Ed Freyfogle of Nestoria penned the article below about why they (Nestoria) were moving away from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap as their mapping platform provider. I have asked Ed to present at the Property Portal Watch Workshop to be held in San Francisco on the 30th July 2012.
During his session, he will look at how and why Nestoria moved from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap and more importantly, the impact it has had on his business. We now have over 40 property portal leaders from around the world already signed up – don’t miss out!
Here is the original article (slightly edited) from Ed Freyfogle.
Before I dive into the why (and the how for all our neogeo mapping freaks amongst our readership), let me say that Google maps remains a phenomenal service that is continually adding amazingly innovative new functionalities. The boom in online cartography witnessed over the last years was kicked off by the launch of Google maps, and I can still remember the light bulb going on in my head when in early 2005 I saw housingmaps.com, the first Google maps mashup. It was clear I was looking at the future. A little over a year later, in June 2006, we launched Nestoria. So I am the first to recognize the unequaled contribution Google has made and continues to make in unlocking the potential of cartography for the world (and technology in general).
In 2006 I had another “ah-ha” moment as well, though. I met Steve Coast, the founder of OpenStreetMap. He explained the idea – a free and editable map of the world made by user contribution. A map that would not just allow me to get the final rendered output, but also the actual data underneath. At the time, looking at Steve as he showed me the GPS device he was using to map the details of our meeting (which took place in a little cafe in Soho across the street from the John Snow pub), the idea of creating a viable map via volunteer submissions seemed preposterous in the extreme. But I watched as OSM grew and grew from those humble beginnings. Now, less than six years later, that map powers Nestoria thanks to millions of man hours of contribution by individuals and organizations that recognize the power of open data.
So, why have we switched? There are four main reasons
1. The maps are equal or better
OpenStreetMap’s great strength is that anyone can contibute. Since the project started over 500,000 people around the world have signed up to do just that, often going into insane levels of detail. Fixes can be added and reflected in the maps very quickly. It is a fundamentally different model than the traditional “only an expert from the government can come make the map” model. People can map whichever features are important to them (paths, pubs, buildings, etc) and escape the car centric focus of many mapping services. All of this data is then made freely available for all to use. Increasingly government agencies are realising that it makes more sense to cooperate with and benefit from this new approach to data gathering and maintenance.
Thanks to the hard work of all of these volunteers, in many places of the world, particularly the European countries we were focused on, OSM maps are of equal or better quality than any other widely available mapping service.
2. It’s another visible way for us to support open data
Our service does nothing more (and nothing less!) than aggregate data from many different sources and present it in an easy to use format. We benefit greatly from open data, and as such we want to do our part (within the limited resources of a start-up) to help the open data movement. This is why we sponsor OpenStreetMap conferences and recently donated toOpenStreetMap’s humanitarian efforts. This is why we feature the work of open data advocates on our blog, and also why we make our own data available via our API and other tools. We are a company that believes in open data.
3. Google introduced charging for map usage
Earlier [last] year Google announced that they would begin introducing limits to the use of Google maps by commercial websites. The good news is that Nestoria has grown nicely since our start in 2006. The bad news was that our size meant that we were well over the free usage limits Google announced.
In November I was contacted by a sales person from the Google Enterprise team. I had suspected we might be over the limit. Obviously no one looks forward to a new cost for their business, but I approached the talk with an open mind. Google Maps is a great service, and we had benefited greatly from it. As a businessperson, I know there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and so I was open to paying Google a reasonable fee for their continued service.
Unfortunately Google’s sales process was not good. Having agreed to a time for a call, the sales rep missed the appointment with no warning, instead calling me 45 minutes late. It was quickly obvious he had done no research whatsoever about our service, what we do, or even where (in which countries) we do it. He was unable to explain the basics of the new charging regime – for example, what exactly is a “map-view”, telling me instead to “ask your developers”. Finally he quoted a price to continue using Google Maps (just on nestoria.co.uk, one of eight countries we operate in) that would have bankrupted our company.
Google’s excellence in technical services was definitely not matched by its salesmanship. The experience was disappointing, and I say this as the founder of a site that has often been featured by Google in promotional literature for our innovative use of Google maps. Having always envisioned that we would someday move to OSM, this was the nudge that pushed us over the cliff.
In the interest of fairness I should also mention that Google has been a great supporter of OSM in the past, donating funds for hardware for instance, and hopefully they will continue to be far into the future. Google remains a great supporter of opensource software with initiatives like their excellent Summer of Code initiative.
We’re very thankful to Google for all the innovation they encourage and for allowing us to use their maps service for free for years. The decision to introduce charging is theirs to make and we can’t argue with it. Despite this though, I have to question some of the logic they presented regarding their reasons for introducing charging now. Google claims charging is needed to ensure the long term commercial viability of the service, but is belt tightening really needed at the same time as Google announces record revenues and profits?
More importantly though I wonder if the decision really achieves the desired outcome. While us moving away from Google Maps will reduce some fractional amount of bandwidth costs for Google it also means our team of engineers will be spending our time working with, and innovating on, other geo technologies. While on the one hand Google spends a lot of effort trying to court developers, decisions like this turn them away. Especially combined with the subpar sales implementation I experienced, this seems to go completely against the ecosystem model that has enabled Google Maps to flourish, which is disappointing.
4. The tools are ready.
Despite all of this, we would not have been technically able to make the switch unless there was a solid set of tools and services around OSM that made the switch possible. I’ll go into these in more detail in the technical part of this post, but let me here once again publicly thank all the developers around the world who have worked hard over the last few years to create the modern neogeo tool chain from scratch. Also let me explicitly thank the companies like AOL’sMapquest and Microsoft’s Bing who are actively supporting OpenStreetMap.
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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Look forward to this session. We have gone through the exercise of examining alternative of local providers and OSM.
We have found a solution for the meantime which suits our needs and will be happy to share the experience and data at the session in JUly – great session topic.
Great post Ed – nice to hear from you and good to hear things are going well; and also good to hear there are viable alternatives to Google Maps – a map that users update much like Wikipedia, who’d a thought? Although I would like to make the footnote that I was developing real estate searches on maps back in 1999, 7 years before Google Maps (!), using mapping products borrowed from the mining industry here in Western Australia – we believe we were the first ever to do it, interactive (clickable) house icons on web maps well before people knew what a map mashup was. We went thru four different map providers (ESRI, NGIS, Amristar and then Multimap) and spent 6-figure sums on it before Sept 2006 Google gave it away for free (!). Just buying the map datasets and address matching data to create the maps was crippling. Them were the days
Hi Charlie, sorry for my very delayed response, I’ve been on a bit of holiday. An inspiring tale. Reminds me of my days back at Yahoo! in the 90s when we used to hand craft the entire internet every night. Raw materials would come in the factory at one end, web pages would get shoved out a 56k modem at the other. The conditions down at the coal face were inhuman by modern standards, but such was the reality of the day.
Will you be in SF so we can further reminisce about the glory days?
All depends on the country/area where the portal is. We found open streepmaps not well supported in Africa and particular South Africa and Namibia.
But good that there are alternatives as a monopoly from one company (like google) is never a good thing.
Hi Adriaan,
you are 100% correct, it all depends on your market. We switched away from Google maps in some markets and still use it in others. There are technologies that make it possible to change the map provider based on city, etc. Often in the developing world (if I can use that term for ZA and Namibia) the cities are much better covered than out in the countryside. The key is judging whether it makes sense to invest the effort to keep flexibility.
All of this will be covered in the talk. Hope to see you in SF.
We are also considering using Open Street Map data to generate our own maps for a few reasons:
1. We can make improvements to the data and the changes are freely available to others (unlike Google Maps); and
2. We can generate the map tiles using colours, fonts, details that are best for our users and match the branding of our sites.
Here is an example of the the kind of detail and customisation you can achieve with OSM data.
http://mapbox.com/maps/
Google’s decision to start charging heavy users is the best thing to happen to online mapping in a long time.
> Google’s decision to start charging heavy users is the > best thing to happen to online mapping in a long time.
agree, it has set off an explosion of support for and interest in OSM. Will cover that in the talk.
Nevertheless, we shouldn’t write off old Google just yet. Google maps is an amazing service. It’s phenomenal how much they have innovated in the last half decade. Congrats to them.